Cooper asked Jodi Meadows:

How do you create such deep characters and character development throughout the story? I was a huge fan of Before She Ignites, and I fell in love with the characters. You are an amazing writer!

Jodi Meadows That is a longer answer than we really have space for! But the short version is this:

I think of my characters as fully formed people, and it's my job to get to know them well enough to translate them to the page.

It's also my job to become a skilled enough writer to be able to put characters on the page in a clear enough way for people not living in my head (readers) to be able to understand what's happening.

Those, to me, are two different things, and they level up at different speeds.

While I don't have a full checklist of things I need to know about my characters, I spend a lot of time thinking about their goals, histories, desires, secrets, fears, reactions, skills, and other things that will help me in my drafting. Those all guide me in how characters will take action, how they will react to situations, and why they do what they do.

For me, characters drive the story.

I don't always get it right the first time. I'm working on FI2 right now, and a couple of early readers had to come in and tell me they didn't believe the way a character behaved, because it seemed inconsistent with her actions and mindset before. So I'm fixing it. Good writing is really just good revising. :)

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